Archives For Alan Shimel

NetworkWorld’s Alan Shimel recently published his list of the 10 most successful open source projects of 2012, and SugarCRM is there on the list. Sugar earned kudos for its integrations with Sharepoint, Lotus Notes, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Outlook, but beyond that, Shimel writes, SugarCRM has“emerged from Salesforce’s shadow and become a CRM power in its own right. With lots of ways to consume Sugar, there is a model and a price point for just about everyone. While continuing to innovate, Sugar has found its place.”

Of course, in order to find that place, SugarCRM’s had to focus on more than just being an open-source alternative. SugarCRM had to focus on addressing the top problem of its users better than the competition: enabling the entire organization to effectively engage with customers, and making every connection and call drive value for each customer. Recognizing the need for an organization-wide customer engagement platformgives Sugar’s internal team and those of its resellers partners direction to use the flexibility that the application’s open source heritage provides.

The others on the NetworkWorld list – Hadoop, MongoDB, OpenStack, Pentaho, PostgreSQL, Joomla, WordPress, DotNetNuke and Audacity – have also been keen observers of the business needs of their customers. To see the full list, visit Shimel’s slideshare deck outlining his 10 open source success stories.